Inject a little Botox into your resume

The story in the Wall Street Journal was titled Botox for Your Résumé, the cautionary tale of a 49-year-old entertainment broadcaster and film reviewer who kept seeing jobs she had applied for go to younger people.

"Who would ever dream that '20-plus years of experience' would be a liability?" Lisa Johnson Mandell told Journal reporter Christina Binkley, referring to the part of her résumé that she highlighted before sending it out.

Her husband put it bluntly: They think you're too old.

Once she had recovered from the shock of this insight, Johnson Mandell decided to make a few corrections, not to herself but to that CV and its abundance of information about her age and past experience. She committed, as the Catholic Church would say, acts of omission rather than commission.

That is, she removed her birth date, the date she graduated from college (1980) and a few of her earlier jobs.

Removing early jobs and dates isn't unethical, career consultant Wendy Enelow told the reporter. For candidates who have hit their late 40s, especially, it's best to focus on their last 10 to 15 years on the job.

Then Johnson Mandell took it a few steps further. She used a young stylist to prepare her for a photo shoot - wearing more hip than executive clothing - which she used for the CV and on her new video blog site. Not only did she include some of her work on the site, but it was a cool addition to the CV because prospective employers could check her out on her own website as well.

The photos weren't airbrushed, Johnson Mandell said. But the message was youthful and completely avoided the (sadly) negative connotations of her age.

Responses started coming in within a week.

Soon she was offered a job contributing to radio morning shows and another to create an entertainment website. She signed, finally with a company called Digital Publishing for a salary, stock options and a percentage of ad revenue in the brand-new site.

The vice-president of the company, who admitted he had imagined a younger person for the job, said that his new employee "demonstrated ... energy and enthusiasm."

Her age had become irrelevant, partly because it was never brought up.

She even had the pleasure of getting responses from four other companies that had never answered her when she sent the old résumé.

"I told them, 'Thanks for the call, but I'm really tied up right now,' " she said.

Yes. It's a shame that some workers convey a negative image because of their age, and even more discouraging that these workers are more likely to be female than male.

But it's actually not about looking young, according to Maxine Martens, chief executive of the executive-recruitment agency Martens & Heads in New York. Attitude and knowledge of today's world are just as important, she says, and that means looking as though you would be comfortable in a workplace full of 20-somethings.